


No Dawn, No Day

by l_cloudy



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Legends, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-16
Updated: 2015-05-16
Packaged: 2018-03-30 18:01:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3946324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/l_cloudy/pseuds/l_cloudy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All of the North knows the story of the Night’s King and his pale queen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Dawn, No Day

**Author's Note:**

> An exercise in speedwriting for for [this prompt](http://asoiafkinkmeme.livejournal.com/22515.html?thread=15734515#t15734515). Title from [Florence & The Machine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EIeUlvHAiM).

In the old days, before the Seven Kingdoms and the coming of the Andals, when the Children of the Forest walked among the children of men and magic flew freely in the world, there was a dark king who lived in a castle in a wall of ice with a soul as black as the night that gave him his name. The king was a fearsome warrior with a heart of stone, and his pale queen a sorceress from the frozen lands, with her skin pale as snow and her eyes bright as sapphires. They said she was winter made flesh, beautiful and cold and deadly.

And so they lived in the frozen castle, the Night’s King and his pale queen, and there was not one soul in the North who had not heard of their cruelty and their sorceries, of their bloody rites under the dark velvet of the moonless sky.

They said the king had given up his life to gain power on the dead, and that the queen’s hand were always as cold as those of a corpse; and they would hide in the shadows and prey on the wanderers until the day the harsh winter gave way to the new spring, when the lords of the south and the raiders from the north came together onto the castle – and that was the last time anyone heard of the Night’s King for as long as the Wall stood.

Spring turned into summer and soon was winter again, and on and on for centuries, as the world grew old and kingdoms rose and fell only to rise again. Then the Long Winter came, the dark night that never ends, and when the dawn broke the land had changed and the world lay in ruins. Plague had swept through the south and the arms of dead through the north, green fire had consumed the city of King’s Landing and the great castle of Winterfell was nothing more than a frozen ruin.

And yet humanity survived, as always, and rebuilt, and life went on; and it was not long after that men started to whisper and women to pray, and they would hold their children tight at night, because the Night’s King had come back.

He’d taken up residence further north, in a tower on a hill in the lands that used to be of the Free Folk, in the place the first battle of the war had been fought, when the Watch had gone up against the dead and lost. The tower was white with snow and red like a ruby in the setting sun, and some said that it shone the color of blood because its foundation lay on the graves of good men, and this was the source of the king’s power.

When the story reached Winterfell, it was said that the Queen was stricken, and had to excuse herself for the rest of the meal; but the Lord of Last Heart merely laughed. “There’s more whores in a sept than good men in the Night’s Watch,” he said. “And they never had graves.” When the Queen came back she asked for a Southron ballad, some song of the Young Dragon and the Conquest of Dorne, and some say that there were tears in her eyes.

Outside the castle walls, away from the protection of stone and spells, the wind swept the fields and rivers of North, and their sound was almost like a human voice, a woman’s song of darkness and sorrow and times gone by. Sometimes a man or a woman would follow the voice of the wind, or so they called it, climbing out their beds in the middle of the night, stumbling in the shadows under the midday sun. They would blink away, disappear, and everyone would know where they’d gone to; but no one dared to speak the world aloud.

“You call for the Night’s King, he’ll come to you,” women in the North would tell their children, whispered stories before sleep. “He’ll come and take you away to his tower of ice, and you’ll never find your way home again.”

Only sometimes people _would_ find home again, decades later, pale and trembling and afraid of shadows, looking like no time had passed at all. They told tales of the place beyond the winds and the red spray of blood on the pale snow, of a lady with her long hair like ripe wheat and eyes the color of a spring morning; and the way she held the blade and slit their throat, letting the blood spring against the roots of the weirwood tree.

Then they would start to die, those returned, their lifeblood flowing as their bodies got warmer, running through wounds that never closed, for the dead cannot heal.

Only death can pay for life, the saying goes; and the Winter’s Court knew it well. The king’s attendants were all immortal, those foundlings and runaways made as eternal as time itself, bodies frozen in their last moments. For the king may not lord over the souls of the dead, as some stories said, but he was master of the moments in between, all the _not-quite_ and the _almost_ that might have been.

It was always twilight in the king’s tower; a perpetual dusk of long shadows and cold winds, and the snows always red as they once must have been in that battle no one alive could remember anymore.

Only death can pay for life, the king knew it well – hadn’t he given his own life, after all, bantered it away to the Gods of Winter he so despised to win a war they all thought lost. And his queen had gone with him, of course, not out of duty but of choice; and together they’d gone to their death, and were made anew.

And so they lived in their tower, the king of snows and his queen of ice, lost in a never-ending nightfall; watching over the living and the dying and the everlasting North.

**Author's Note:**

> Hit me up on [tumblr](http://www.kyhlos.tumblr.com) if you'd like!


End file.
